And then he had awakened in his bed, where his story began so long ago.

“I’ll take it from here.”

Eric turned, his face still contorted with fear, and found the foggy man’s gun aimed at his head again.

Time was up.

“Come on.  Back away.”

Eric stepped away from the awful clay pot, his hands out to his sides, in clear view.  They were trembling.

“I don’t know how you got away from me back there, and I don’t know how you got here before me, but I do appreciate you solving the riddle of the pots for me.”

Clearly, Foggy had misinterpreted the fear on his face.  He didn’t realize that it wasn’t the gun that had frightened him.

Eric didn’t enlighten him.

He circled around the psycho with the gun, trying to force himself to relax, to shake off the horrors he had seen, but he couldn’t stop himself from trembling.  He couldn’t make his heart stop pounding.

This was why he had felt such dread as he recalled the dream.  Somewhere, deep inside, he’d known all along how it ended.

Now standing between Eric and the clay pot, preventing him from making a last ditch grab for it, the Foggy man swung the gun and struck him across the side of the head.

Eric dropped to the floor, cursing and clutching his face.

He was getting really tired of this guy hitting him.

“So this is the one, is it?”

Eric glared up at him.  “No.  It’s the green one.”

“Sure it is.”

“The tall one, then?”

“Shut up.”

“If you say so.”

“I was watching you.  It was this one.  You were sure of it.  I could tell.”

Eric stared up at him, studying him.  “I just like the pretty ribbon.”

Foggy grinned.  “I kind of like you.  You’re fun.”

“I try.”

He must have been watching from the door.  When he settled on the one with the red ribbon, it would have been obvious that he knew it was the one.  But he mistook hesitance for fear.  From his perspective, as he crept up behind his target, it must have seemed that Eric let go of the lid because he heard his approaching footsteps.  The fear in his eyes when he looked back was probably the same fear people had regarded him with for years.

It was ironic, really, that it would be his arrogance that ultimately destroyed him.

The foggy man shook his head in a mock display of regret.  “But you’re just not useful anymore.”

“You don’t know that.  I have a lot of talents.”

“Sorry.  Nothing personal.”

“How could I possibly take it personally?”

“That’s the right attitude.”

Eric really didn’t like this guy.

“Now let’s see…  Should I kill you before or after I see what’s so interesting about this pot?”

Eric glanced past him at the clay pot with the red ribbon tied around it.  The memory of his dream still shook him.  He couldn’t get the horrors out of his mind.  He had actually dreamed his own death.  Looking back at the foggy man, he said as calmly as he could manage, “I’d say the least you could do is let a beaten old man see what he almost had.”

Grinning, the man formerly known to Eric as the foggy man stepped up to the ledge next to the clay pot and placed his hand on the lid.  “It’s something really powerful, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” lied Eric.  “If you’re really smart, you’ll take it and disappear with it instead of giving it to your bosses.”

“Maybe I will.”  Grinning, the foggy man lifted the lid off the clay pot.

Eric turned away and stared at the floor, unable to watch as the man who had once struck fear into his heart cried out in pitiful, wailing shrieks of terror and anguish.

He wasn’t proud to have let the man die.  But he would have killed him.  There was no question about that.  If the boy’d had more brains than ego, he would’ve killed him immediately instead of making him watch as he took the prize.

And he was going to get Father Billy killed, too.  Eric couldn’t allow that.

Still, no one deserved to die like this.

It went on for a long time.  A terribly long time.  And it happened just as he remembered it happening to him in his dream.

After all he’d been through, the dream he was following had been leading him to failure.  If he’d arrived two days ago, when everyone here told him he was supposed to, he would have died.

Instead, he now remained perfectly alive and in possession of both of his hands.

But he never found what he was sent for, which meant he may still have to relive that violent death every night in his dreams.  Except now he would remember every agonizing detail.

It was no wonder they said it would drive him mad.

Even after the foggy man stopped screaming, Eric stared down at the floor, unwilling to look at the body of the man he’d essentially killed.  As he did, he realized that there was an image of a hawk etched into the golden disk in the center of the floor.

He looked up at the slowly darkening sky.  The funnel opened up from this one point in the floor.  Even the tiles had been arranged so that they spiraled into it.

Grant told him it was a singularity, the exact place at which the two worlds met.  A single point in space.

Right at the bottom of this hole.

Right in the middle of this floor.

Birds.  They’d been everywhere today, in some way or another, like signs.  The eagle over the barn door.  The birdhouses at the farmhouse.  The totem pole at the resort.  The Canada goose on the factory’s sign.  Even the symbol on the hood of the Firebird at the salvage yard.  And then there were the real birds.  He’d been spooking them out of brush and trees all day.  The hawks.  The crows.  The ducks in the lake.  Even the freaky chickens back in the barn and that giant bird coasting over the swamp.  He’d thought that he’d seen them in the dream because they’d been so prevalent along the fissure, but they were more than that.  The birds had been pointing to his true goal all along.

He felt around the edges of the disk and found that it was loose.

It was here.  Hidden in plain sight.  The clay pots were only a distraction from the true prize.

He pulled out the metal disk and found a narrow hole beneath it, barely large enough to fit his hand into.  There was a wooden stick of some sort inside.  He gripped it by its end and pulled it out, revealing it to be a four-foot long, wooden staff.

As soon as it was free and in his hands, Eric knew what it was, who it belonged to, what it was used for.

In fact, he knew a great many things.

He knew too much.

He closed his eyes and cried out as fantastic things flooded into his unprepared mind.  Awesome things.  Terrible things.  Powerful things.  This new knowledge shook him even more violently than the memory of his dream death.

He tried to let go of the staff, but he couldn’t.

He rose to his feet and tried to walk, but he stumbled.

The things he suddenly knew…

Such information that he could scarcely fathom it…

He opened his eyes wide and stared at the staff he now held in his hands.

The hands that once held it…  Hands so strong…  Hands that had known God…

And he wasn’t the first to hold this staff since those ancient times.  Others had possessed this secret as well.  Eleven of them.  The last was entombed in a clay urn and deposited in an ordinary hayfield in Illinois.  Not the secret at all, like Edgar and the others had believed, but merely a return of the last sentry into this tomb.

That was why there were six of them.  They were the pallbearers.

He also knew that the staff was no longer important.  Its power was spent, the knowledge it contained passed into him.  It was time to put it back in its resting place.

Eric returned the staff to its hole and replaced the gold disk over the top of it.

His body still twitching with the power of the revelations he’d been given, he stood up on shaking legs and turned toward the door.